Nearly every U.S. teenager has access to a smartphone — 95%, according to the latest Pew Research Center data — and they don’t stop using them when the school bell rings.
A study published in JAMA Pediatrics in February found students ages 13 to 18 spend on average 1½ hours of each school day on their smartphones doing things like sending texts, playing games and checking social media.
In school district boardrooms across Lancaster County, officials are having discussions about the distractions cellphones pose in the classroom and the role phones play in degrading the mental health of students, yet school leaders say they don’t see a need for much change.
Pennsylvania legislators, educators, parents and teachers are all asking the same question:
Should smartphones be banned in schools?
Lancaster County’s former state senator, Republican Ryan Aument, last year took a definite step toward restricting phone use in schools by making lockable bags an approved use of the state’s School Safety and Mental Health Grant.
But not one Lancaster County school district took advantage of the opportunity.
Asked why they didn’t jump at the chance to lock up students’ phones in bags, officials from more than a dozen county school districts said they already have policies in place that are working for them.
“We have not purchased the lockable cellphone bags,” Donegal School District Superintendent Greg Kiehl said in an email. “We have a system in place which we believe works for the majority of our students.”
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‘The Anxious Generation’
Much of the talk on policing cellphones has been driven by the New York Times bestseller “The Anxious Generation” by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, published in March 2024. In his book, Haidt points out correlations between cellphone use and declining mental health as well as academic performance among adolescents.
For example, Haidt pointed to a rise in “internalizing disorders,” like anxiety and depression, since 2010, with the percent of U.S. adolescents ages 12 to 17 experiencing a major depressive episode in the past year more than doubling – from 12% to 28% for girls and 4% to 11% for boys – in that 15-year period.
That increase coincided with the widespread adoption of smartphones by all Americans, including teens.
“A lot of the credit for the book’s success is because it tapped into something that parents and educators and teachers are seeing everyday in their classrooms,” said Ravi Iyer, research director for the University of Southern California Marshall School’s Neely Center. Iyer served as a research partner on “Anxious Generation.”
The book was sitting on Penn Manor School District Superintendent Phil Gale’s desk as he spoke to a reporter about cellphone policies in July. Aument’s legislation on lockable cellphone bags was based on research in the book and sparked by meeting Haidt at a conference.
And a new proposed school cellphone ban, spearheaded by Republican state Sen. Devlin Robinson, of Allegheny County, cites research in “The Anxious Generation.”
“As more studies come out showing the harmful effects of excessive cellphone use on children and teens, the negative impact it’s having on education is clear,” Robinson said via email. “Students are unable to focus, increasingly experiencing mental health problems, and teachers are exhausted as it becomes harder and harder to engage with students whose attention is elsewhere.”
Penn Manor High School psychology teacher Maria Vita echoed Robinson’s concerns about student attention spans since phones have become more prevalent. Vita has been teaching for more than 20 years.
“It feels like you have a battle on your hands of basically trying to keep your students’ attention,” Vita said. “That battle never existed before.”
While administrators say existing policies governing phone use are working, Robinson questioned whether teachers feel the same. He cited a 2024 survey by the National Education Association that found 83% of teachers support banning phones during the entire school day.
Vita said she can see why some would find Robinson’s ban helpful, as she communicates often with teachers across the country. But at Penn Manor, Vita said she feels supported by the administration and its policies.
“For some teachers, I think it is overwhelming,” Vita said. “I’ve definitely had colleagues in other states that are just like, ‘I don’t want to fight this battle anymore.’”
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Managing cellphones in the classroom
Robinson said his proposed legislation would require schools to create, adopt and implement their own policy to prohibit the use of phones, with limited exceptions, during the school day.
If the legislation is passed, “I’m hopeful that Pennsylvania will see the same positive results that other schools have experienced when they go phone-free — students who are more engaging both socially and academically; students who are able to focus on learning; students who experience less anxiety and depression because they are getting long breaks from a device and apps that increase those symptoms,” Robinson said.
Lancaster County’s 17 school districts already have policies placing some limitations on cellphone use during the instructional day, and most either outright prohibit them while a student is in class or leave it up to teacher discretion. District policies tend to be more flexible on use by high school students, with more restrictions placed at the middle and elementary school levels.
“This is a tough one,” Gale said. “In some cases, cellphones have become part of the learning process. … We want to help students, we want to prepare students. But we also, in some cases, have to think about what are some of the distractors and is the cellphone contributing to that distraction?”
As a psychology teacher, Vita has an extra set of tools she can apply for her classes: the psychology behind the distraction of cellphones.
Vita does an activity with her students that demonstrates switch tasking, or the process of rapidly shifting attention between different tasks or mental activities. After switching between two academic tasks, she said the students find the tasks take longer and they make more mistakes.
The same thing happens when a student glances away from the whiteboard to send a quick text to a friend.
“They can clearly see that trying to do two things at once is going to make you a less effective learner,” Vita said.
If students don’t trust themselves to keep the phone in a pocket or a backpack, Vita has the student put them in a “phone jail,” which can be a box, a drawer or the type of back-of-the-door holder that might typically store calculators for a math class.
On rare occasions, if a student refuses to put down their phone or becomes aggressive, she’ll send them to the principal’s office to have the phone confiscated.
“That’s been so eye-opening to me that for some kids, they are horrified, and also feel legitimately in the right to keep their phone out,” Vita said.
Several school district administrators have said they don’t confiscate phones at a rate that would need to be tracked.
Olivia Sieg, an English facilitator at Pequea Valley Secondary School, talks about the cell phone holder in her classroom on Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025.
Testing student self-control
At Pequea Valley’s new Secondary School, which brings grades 7 through 12 under one roof, calculator holders repurposed as cellphone holders — like what Vita keeps in her room — will be used in all classrooms, following a successful pilot of the practice in the 2024-25 school year.
Students won’t be required to put their phone in the holder, but if they’re caught using it during instructional time, they’ll be referred to administration and the phone will be confiscated for the remainder of the day, Secondary School Principal John Trovato said.
“It removes the need for a regular warning from classroom educators by making it a part of the daily procedures,” Trovato said. “It allows autonomy for the students to decide on their own to put it in the holder or keep it on their person.”
Last year, Trovato said, five teachers tested phone holders at the high school, and they reported they had virtually no issues with students once the holders were implemented. Most students, he added, chose to leave their phone in the holder.
“The issue is dramatically reduced,” Trovato said, referencing the pilot program’s effectiveness. “If our goal is to get kids to be able to self-regulate, if they’re actively choosing to put them in there, that means they’re choosing to acknowledge they either don’t want to risk getting it out or they’re admitting they can’t handle having it in their pocket.”
Self-policing is easier for some students than others.
Vita said she’s fortunate she mainly teaches advanced placement and honors classes — students who are challenging themselves with a higher academic rigor. These students require less interference from her to make the right call on phone usage.
While studies, including those featured in “The Anxious Generation,” show a correlation between increased phone use and lowered grades, Vita says the correlation is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
Are students on their phone more because they don’t care much about school, or do they earn lower grades because they can’t put the phone down?
“We don’t know what comes first,” she said.
Emma Griffith, a 2025 graduate of Elizabethtown Area High School, noticed similar correlations in her advanced placement and honors classes. Students, including herself, didn’t seem to be as tempted by phones as her counterparts in less rigorous classes.
A teacher once told her class, “ ‘You’re my AP class. If you choose to be on your phone — that’s your decision,’ ” Griffith said.
When her classmates use their phones, it wasn’t a distraction for her, Griffith said. Like her teacher, she concluded, it’s their choice.
Sometimes, though, she said it was tempting to scroll through social media on her phone while completing homework assignments after school.
She’s thankful she didn’t really have access to social media until around eighth grade, when she received a phone with data access. From sixth to eighth grade, she had an iPod Touch that could text only when she had WiFi internet access.
Instead, Griffith watched her peers struggle with cyberbullying through social media during middle school — an experience she said she’s lucky to have avoided.
“I’m older, I’m more confident now,” Griffith said, “The things I see online don’t consume me as much. … But I will say sometimes it does definitely get me down for the day or an hour if I see something upsetting.”
Griffith isn’t confident a ban on cellphones or social media would work in all schools.
“It’s a good idea, but students will always find a way around everything,” she said. “Because cellphones are already so normalized, it will be so hard to take any of that away, even if it’s just in school.”
Griffith, who served as a student representative on the Elizabethtown Area school board in her senior year, said she’d rather see a social worker or counselor added to a school instead of restricting access to cellphones.
Restrictions may be self-defeating, Griffith said. She believes expanding access to social workers or counselors would be a better focus for schools — experts who can ask, “Why do students want to use their phones?”
“That will break down the core issues of why,” she said.
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